My company has just moved me from Lotus Notes to OWA (Office Outlook Web Access).

Since I am a CLP (Certified Lotus Professional) I am a bit biased but trying to keep an open mind.

One thing our company did was drastically reduce the number of days an email can stay in your mailbox.

Is there a way I can archive off my mail to my local hard drive (please be aware OWA is setup by our company for web access only and I am just a user)?

I am new to OWA but maybe a desktop client of some sort could be installed or maybe there is some other way to transfer these emails locally

Thanks

Evolution can talk to OWA (in fact until recently it couldn't talk to Exchange any other way), and also supports local mail folders.

Peter

I've had luck with fetchExc. Basically works similar to fetchmail to download mail off an Exchange server via OWA.

I can't understand a company that moves from Notes to Exchange.

The only way I can see it working is if they only ever used Notes for Email/Calendar. In that case, I could see a migration working.

But when I used Notes, we did so much more than Email. I co-wrote an entire version control system in Notes. Put that in your Outlook and smoke it, Microsoft.

Frying pan/fire. Rock/hard place.

I'm sorry that you had to deal with Notes and I'm sorry that you are going to have to deal with Exchange.


I'm not sure if I'm unaware of a switch that can turn off RPC/HTTP in OWA or if you've just been told that that's all they're giving you.

Do you have a copy of Outlook? You should be able to set up Outlook to access Exchange via RPC/HTTP — that is, via the OWA web site — and use it just as if it was making a direct connection to the Exchange server. I can't really test it right now because Outlook only allows you to configure one Exchange account (Why? Because it's a piece of crap.) but you should be able to find instructions online.

Last I checked, that was only working for the 2003(?) version of Exchange, not the newer version that companies now seem to be upgrading/installing.

Ah, OK. It was some time ago that I last had to do this -- eventually I talked the mail admins into turning on proper IMAP+SSL.

Peter

Migrating mail systems is a nightmare, we're about to migrate from Scalix v10 to whatever the latest version of Exchange is. We've tried 2 tools sold for the job, neither worked for us. Looks like we'll be exporting PSTs and re-importing them, although Scalix doesn't export the message header info correctly, so more faffing...

Would have stayed with Scalix if we could find a decent support org, and the licensing costs weren't almost the same as MS now.

No help to you though.

So this time round you've made sure to choose a mail system where all the data and metadata can be exported in standardised formats?

(Actually Exchange is OK at that these days with the mail itself. But I don't know whether you can get at the calendaring and stuff with non-MS tools yet?)

Peter

Our company (over 70k employees now) has been using Lotus Notes since version 1.0. Over 20 years now. We are supposedly moving to Exchange for cost cutting reasons. But the truth is our new head of IT just hates Lotus Notes and this is the third company he has worked for and done this to. I guess the other two companies kicked him out after he made the switch.

We have thousands of apps. developed in Lotus Notes/Domino and many are having to be rewritten (Tuition Reimbursements, Time off, and our entire company Portal) and the rest are just thrown out. I sure don’t know how this is saving money.

The one application I like to brag on is my Benefits Open Enrollment app. (although that was over ten years ago). In those days all companies still used paper to enroll and it was a pain. I also created a Confidential Employee Data application that retrieved all the data our HR system and placed it in Notes. Many application in Notes where then built off this app. Employees still use it on a daily basis to check their HR data.

The archive issue and the fact that OWA doesn’t even have a user dictionary is just icing on our shit-cake.

Well I have Outlook Express. I guess that is the same as Outlook (like I said this is all new to me).

On the E-mal Server Names setup page I have it set to....


My incoming mail server is a "HTTP" server

My HTTP mail service provide is "Other"

Incoming mail (POP3,IMAP, or HTTP) server: "https://mail.MYCOMPANYNAME.com/owa


I then get the error message - "Please enter a valid HTTP server"

I thought I was. I tried removing the https and the /owa. Nothing seems to work.

No, Outlook Express is nothing like Outlook, at all.

If you are using an Exchange server you really need to be using Outlook rather than Outlook Express.

There has always been a COM interface that you could create/edit/delete mail/calendar/task/etc entries with. It hasn't always worked well and it doesn't typically give you complete access to all the fields in Exchange records, but it has always been there for third party developers to target.

No, I've made sure that we're moving to a platform which lots of different orgs can support. We're not a big firm; 25 users, expanding quickly but I can't see us having much more than 50 mail users in 5 years time. I guess we'll probably upgrade to the latest version of Exchange when the time comes. We only moved from Exchange 5.5 because we needed to upgrade and Scalix was a LOT cheaper than Exchange at the time.

Not that it helps anyone in your position, but this is why it's such a good idea to ask at job interviews what mail system a company uses, and what source-control system they use -- not necessarily because any of them are unusable (though some are), but because it's a simple way of finding out whether the IT department is operated for its users' benefit or wholly for its own benefit (or the benefit of the IT director's golf buddies). Exchange+Outlook+IMAP is a reasonable thing to hear as an answer; Exchange+OWA and no IMAP would be a big red flag.

Peter

The company I work for has been going down hill for the last five years. It was a company of high achievers and the company valued their employees. Since our direction changed to provide customer care outsourcing we are just “cheeks in seats” that are a cost to be cut.

And you are still there because?

Good $ and work from home. My department is full of good people and my manager is great. The company as a hole is not so hot.

I tried to get this to work on a Win 2000 machine. I got a ton of Classloader errors (Unknown Source). I have Java 6 so I would think I would be up to date. Maybe I need an older version or something.

Also if I get this to work, and update a local mail file, what should I view the mail file with?

Looks like Office costs and I know my company won't pay.

Looks like it might be possible.....

http://onemansjourneyintolinux.blogspot.com/2007/05/connecting-to-exchange.html

Interesting sequence of words.
MMmm.. might come in useful someday.

-ml

That's probably why MS released a totally new Exchange 2007 server, with new protocol and all.. to shut that solution out again, for a while.

-ml

At times I feel I'm in a hand basket heading down the hole

I last used it on a Mac with Java 5, Java 6 should work just fine in theory. Make sure you have the other .jar files (commons-httpclient-3.0.1.jar and others) linked off that page in the same place as the FetchExc.jar file.

It can either save to a local mbox file, or forward the mail on to an SMTP server (like GMail). I believe Thunderbird would work to read a local mbox file, though I don't know if it will constantly update, or require an import process to be run.

Rolling out Exchange without Outlook just seems like a bad idea, but then again it sounds like the whole project is a collection of bad ideas. If I was migrating away from Notes, I'd be looking at web app solutions to replace the custom Notes apps, and move the mail/calendaring/directory stuff over to standards like IMAP, CalDAV and LDAP to just let people use what they want.

Woo Hoo I'm getting closer. It seems to be connecting but then I get this....

INFO: ntlm authentication scheme selected
[Fatal Error] :1:1: Premature end of file.
IOException in fetchAll()):Premature end of file.

I've created a local mail file but I think its talking about the a file on the server, maybe.

As previously stated, it is not. I would suggest getting your hands on an "evaluation" copy of Outlook and seeing if it works and you like the way it works. If so, you can, uh, upgrade your evaluation copy.

MS should really have redone their Outlook Express and called it Entourage, because it really (really) has nothing to do with the Outlook that ships with Office. I suppose they both have "crap" in common though.

I disagree. Here's why:

Exchange means they're using the Exchange calendar, for which the only clients are Outlook, Entourage, and OWA (which is bad at the best of times, but which is awful if you're not using IE; for example, without IE, there's no email search feature).

Exchange automatically converts every text/plain email into HTML to present to IMAP users. This might be okay if it would bother to use a monospaced font.

Exchange munges RFC(2)822 emails by separating incoming mail headers from the body and reconstructing the RFC(2)822 email when needed, for example, for IMAP clients. The resultant email will look sort of like the original, but will be different. In a particularly egregious flaw, it throws away all "Resent-" headers except Resent-Mailer.

Exchange means most everyone is using Outlook. Outlook has any number of bugs, like splitting a long URL at 72 (or some other arbitrary number of) columns, without using quoted-printable's line continuation feature, despite setting Content-Transfer-Encoding to quoted-printable. In order to resolve this, Outlook would have to take the extreme tactic of adding a "=" to the broken ends. (Outlook, of course, knows about this Outlook bug and works around it, which can break correctly formatted messages with long URLs by combining them with the next line.) Amazingly, it seems no one has written a Thunderbird extension to emulate Outlook's workaround. It could work even better by only applying it to messages that have the header "User-Agent: .*Outlook". Oh, except Outlook doesn't bother to send a User-Agent header.

Oh, and Outlook automatically expands email groups into a list of everyone in the group, so there's no way to have your mail client tell you if a message from Outlook was sent directly to you or to a group you happen to be in. And I always feel like a prick doing a reply-all to a list of fifty people instead of just a reply-to-group.

Outlook also automatically converts emoticons to webdings. Of course, a smiley-face in webdings is encoded as "J", so it sends a "J", but it encodes it as us-ascii, which means that any correct email client will just display a "J".

Outlook means that if someone sends you an email that contains nothing but ":)", you will receive a 2300-character HTML blob (I counted. Okay, wc counted.) that tells you "J".

Outlook also means that everyone will be top-posting.

Outlook means forwarded messages will be in that horrible Outlook forwarding format where it's inlined without any quoting indicators, and the few headers that are included have actual email addresses stripped from them. And there's not any way to turn on any other method of forwarding. Not that the Frankenmail that Exchange generated is going to help you out anyway.

And if your IT department rolled the critical failure of Exchange plus Blackberry Enterprise Server, have fun watching every email sent to you get delivered, deleted, delivered, deleted, delivered, deleted, and delivered again, all within a few seconds. I'm pretty sure each of these has a different IMAP UID. Sometimes it'll do it again a few minutes later, leaving behind such unimportant flags as "read" and "responded" while in limbo. And if it decides to delete it while you're looking at it in Thunderbird, all sorts of fun things can happen until you reselect the new version, like it can't find the attachments, or if you forward it, it's empty. (Is this a Thunderbird bug? Yeah, maybe, but it's still egregious on Exchange's or BES's part.)

Also, IT departments are loath to support multiple clients (with reason). So when you encounter an IMAP-related problem, they're most likely going to tell you "too bad; use Outlook". This is fun when the Exchange server is rebooted and decides that it didn't need to start the IMAP server this time.

Other than that last one (and then only because I am the IT department), this is all common, recent personal experience. And I'm pretty sure there are more that aren't popping to mind. There are other serious complaints and whines.

Entourage is marginally better than Outlook. It's generally less broken, and generally has a better UI, but try to, for example, send an HTML link. Hah! Can't do it, can you? It's not as if it doesn't send HTML mail, though. You still get that bloat (though, IIRC, it's reasonably easy to turn off) but not such advanced HTML features as "a href" links.

I found a PC with Outlook 2003. Initial results are not good. I think I need 2007.

Not good how? I could be wrong, but I don't think 2007 will help you.

In the setup wizard when setting up "E-mail Accounts" I get "The connection to the MS Exchange Server is unavailable." I'm putting in what I believe is the correct server name. I’ve played with security settings and the like. At least it thinks for awhile before I get the error. Plus it is asking for things like a mailbox which I'm not sure of the name (tried a lot of different things).

Nothing in the setup mentions OWA.

Like I said, I can't really test this, so you may have to search around for some of these options, but on the setup page (if you already have the account set up, as opposed to being stuck in the account setup wizard, you should be able to modify the existing config from Tools→Account Settings) you should see something like "More Settings". Then, maybe under a "Connection" tab, there will be a checkbox for something like "Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP". Then there should be more config options related to that (an "Exchange Proxy Settings" button, maybe?). You should be given a place to enter the URL you use to access it from your web browser. There are probably a bunch of other options that you might have to play around with.

I didn't see this behavior by default in Outlook XP, 2003 or 2007 connected to Exchange 2003. There was a + next to group lists, and clicking it would do what you said.

I will generally stand by and say Outlook does suck though, along with Exchange IMAP support. I'm temporarily using Entourage 2004 (ugg) until Snow Leopard comes out, due to our IMAP access being borked due to a still in progress 2007 migration. Waiting for September to pay $29 is much easier then forking out whatever MS charges for Office upgrades these days. After demoing Entourage 2008, I wasn't too impressed, though I could finally change the buttons in the toolbar.

I currently use Outlook 2003 at home to connect to work using OWA. It's actually kinda nice. Howto HERE

Hmm... Url tag broken?

Hm. Maybe you're right. I could swear I saw it doing this somewhere.

Oh, here's another good one. Despite the fact that you can assign permissions to Exchange mailboxes such that you can let other people access your email through Outlook, Exchange doesn't pass those permissions through the IMAP server, despite IMAP having a very similar permissions mechanism. Not that I even want to be able to modify the permissions through IMAP; I'd just like to be able to access the mailboxes I do have permissions to, and Exchange doesn't even show me that they exist via IMAP.

Agreed, Outlook as a mail client is terrible. That's why I included "+IMAP" in the reasonable answer, so people who care can use Evolution or Eudora or whatever for mail, but still do their calendaring in Outlook.

Peter

------------------------------------------------------
From: wfaulk
Sent: 7/24/09 4:24pm EDT
To: Empeg BBS
Subject: Re: Lotus Notes to OWA - Am I in Hell?

Exchange+Outlook+IMAP is a reasonable thing to hear as an answer

I disagree.
[...]
Outlook also means that everyone will be top-posting.

I understand, but Exchange's IMAP support is terrible, and I included a lot of examples of that. The only Outlook-specific stuff I listed is stuff you'll have to deal with on a regular basis as a recipient.

Your pseudo-Outlook-response actually makes that point for me. Do you really want to be dealing with emails that look like that all the time?

(Oh, and the "From" line should have shown "Bitt Faulk", not "wfaulk".)

Also, if you're not using Windows, good luck using Outlook as your calendaring client. You're stuck with OWA, which, since you can't use IE, is complete dreck. And if you are using Windows, I can't tell you how much fun it is to have a calendaring client that consumes a third of a gigabyte of RAM.

I just remembered another one. At some point, someone is going to use Outlook's polling feature. Not only does that require Outlook to respond to, Exchange doesn't even bother to include any sort of information about the poll — not even in headers — via IMAP, so it's impossible to even write a Thunderbird extension to deal with it.

But how many people care? (Not excusing any failings in Exchange or Outlook)

In some places I've worked, that's been a really good question all round. But particularly when it comes to mail clients, at least people whose job may involve posting to external mailing lists need to care.

Peter

As an end user, I can't say enough bad things about Lotus Notes. I can't say much good about Exchange and OWA, but it's a little better. It's still bad, but relative to Notes I think it's an improvement for the users.

Well after a week of being on vacation I'm back into this.

Thanks for the link. Seems easy to follow. However I can't get past the logon to verify my mailbox. After I put in my Domain\username and password it thinks for awhile and then fails.

I've gone into More Settings tons of times and tried about every combination.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Try leaving off the domain and backslash and just enter your username.

Yea, tried that. The one thing I didn't do (and I don't think I can) is add the PC into the domain.

It looks like the fetchexc program gets passed the authentication process so it seems like it should work.

Well it looks like the owaauth.dll file has been locked down.

I think I have the correct path (FBApath=/owa/bin/auth/owaauth.dll) setup. When I try to access this directory with a browser I get no access allowed message so something is there.

I was thinking about finding owaauth.dll, downloading it to my PC and pointing there. However if I get a compromised dll my emails might end up in China.

If you happen to have one I could try that would be great.

However I don't know if I can get the fetchexc to access it locally instead from the sever.

I wish I could remember how I go it to work. It WAS a pain in the ass, however. I do remember that.

Thanks anyway, I think it might be that RPC over HTTP Proxy is not setup on the server. Or the fact that the FQDN/path is..

https://mail.mycompany.com/owa

....and not....

https://mail.mycompany.com/exchange

There seems to be no way in Outlook to set the path so "/exchange" may be hard coded somewhere.

Oh well, back to Fetchexc...